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Comment: Brenda Power: Children need discipline, so teach parents how to give it

It was a familiar story but no less sad for that. At an inquest in Dublin last week, the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a 16-year-old boy were laid bare.

Like many teenagers he had developed a bad case of acne, so bad that he became depressed. He was a bright kid, but that didn’t prevent him from falling in with an older and wilder crowd. Under their influence he experimented with cannabis and was arrested for possession.

Many parents of teenage kids, especially boys, will recognise that painful rite of passage. It is the sheer familiarity of his exploits that makes the boy’s story all the more terrifying. They are so commonplace that they leave no clue for parents picking over the details in an attempt to identify the one incident that marked him out as a suicide risk. There’s no point listening for an alarm bell when it